← SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
He Turned Pickleball Software into a $3M/yr SaaS
00:25:21
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- [00:00]
A
We are kind of approaching 3 million in contracted ARR. We have a little over 200 locations signed up on the platform. I think we're over 2,000 courts now.
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B
How do your customers actually make the math work without charging 100 bucks an hour?
- [00:13]
A
The videos and replays functionality, they can be monetized with sponsors. Pickleball is growing like crazy in the U.S. you know, fastest growing kind of sport by a pretty wide margin. $8 million Series A round led by Frontier Growth. It's just kind of an OG investor in the vertical SaaS space.
- [00:28]
B
People, are you charging 60 bucks an hour? 70% utilization? So you're doing 100,000 bucks a year in revenue or what was it? I'm curious how it started.
- [00:33]
A
We look at kind of what is the average revenue per hour used? About like $30 per hour across everything.
- [00:40]
B
Before the show you said, Nathan, one of the ways we've really grown and really leaned into building in public. What does that mean?
- [00:45]
A
Enhancing the kind of in club playing experience. We do things like digital scoreboards and video replays. There's a viral component kind of video replays that go social media.
- [00:56]
B
Hey folks, my guest today is Ben Borden. He's the co founder of Pod Play Technologies. Building at the intersection of sports technology and in real life experiences. He leads the go to market strategy and is focused on transforming clubs and courts into dynamic tech driven communities. Before that he worked in fintech, hedge funds and early stage investing. Ben, you ready to take us to the top?
- [01:15]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
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B
You're way cooler now doing this than the hedge fund days, right? That's why you made the transition.
- [01:20]
A
Absolutely. I mean my co founder Max Kogler and I both, we managed to hedge fund together back in the day. So this is kind of our second tour of duty together. I was the seed investor in his hedge fund and we like to say those were our days of turning math into money. But it left both of us feeling a little bit empty. From kind of purpose standpoint. We were doing kind of complex options trading strategies. It was fun. It was like playing chess and doing games. But in terms of really changing the world and really having kind of an impact on people's lives, it left us feeling a little bit wanting. And podplay has been an amazing kind of of purpose driven business. We like to say our mission is to increase the amount of fun being had in the world, which is kind of a mission that pretty much everybody can understand. You know, I think if your kids can understand it, then you really have kind of a mission that resonates With a lot of people.
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B
Well, before we dive into mission and fun, I have to stay on the money for a second. Did the hedge fund make money? Are you rich? How'd that thing work?
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A
Yeah, I mean, we. We took it up to several hundred million dollars in assets, so it was definitely a success story.
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B
Very cool. Okay, so what. What email do you send your LPs? You say we're shutting down to go build ping pong or ping pod in 2019, or what that story looked like.
- [02:26]
A
There are a number of stops in between for both Max and I. So that was back in the kind of mid 2000s. We both had multiple stops before getting to Ping Pod. Prior to joining Pink Pod, I was running digital fund services at Figure Technologies. It's a big sort of blockchain holding company. Actually recently went public in. In Q3. It was September of 2025. They went public. It's been a really nice IPO. I was working there with Mike Cagney. How I met Max was being a seed investor and in his hedge fund, the one that we just. Just talked about. And that.
- [03:04]
B
This was MM Capital, right?
- [03:05]
A
MM Capital, Yeah.
- [03:07]
B
Yeah.
- [03:07]
A
I was running a pool of venture capital seeding startup hedge funds. The first hedge fund I seeded was run by Mike Cagney, who, you know, has went on to be the founder and CEO of SoFi, chairman of Figure Technologies. Mike's one of the kind of only people out there that's done, you know, multiple unicorns. He's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant person. But that kind of early stage, my career, when I was seeding startup hedge funds, has had a real impact on kind of my. My future path.
- [03:32]
B
Okay, I have to ask about this. Don't kill me for this, okay? But my research team basically said, you've talked about this publicly, that there was a black swan event at the hedge fund. Was that the point where you said there could be more to life than managing money all day long? Can you maybe dive into that a bit?
- [03:43]
A
We definitely got. It got. Took a. A large drawdown and kind of a real learning experience for Max and myself. I think you learn a lot about people when you go through kind of adversity together. Right? The way we came through that, I think we treated our investors incredibly well. We got on planes, we went and kind of like talked to everybody about kind of what happened, and everybody was very understanding. And a lot of those investors kind of made future bets on us as well or kind of gave us another chance because we behaved very well through kind of a period of adversity. So that was kind of the biggest learning from that experience is like, how do people comport themselves in? You know, it's easy to kind of be a good person and kind of comport yourself well when everything's going well. But you really learn things about people when you go through adversity together. And I think Max and I were sort of, you know, we forged our bond kind of for life during that period of adversity. And it's great to kind of be in the same boat together again.
- [04:42]
B
How did this, where'd you guys come up with the idea for the business? How did it get going?
- [04:45]
A
Yeah, I think the key is you have kept start with Ping Pod. So the predecessor business was Ping Pod, which is an operating business. So Ping Pod is a network of autonomous table tennis clubs. It was founded in 2019 by Max David Silverman and Ernesto Ebwin. I was the first outside investor in that business and the problem they were trying to solve. You had basically at that point New York City, you had kind of one large entertainment destination, had to play ping pong. Then you had kind of basement dojo style clubs and there was really nothing in between. And the reason for that was you have relatively high rents in New York City of relatively high labor costs. So the possibility of running a profitable ping pong club without food and booze was very little at that point. So we looked at that cost stack and said, hey, if we could do something about the labor piece insert technology, then there might be a third way to do this. So that was the idea. Could you take out that front desk type labor run without kind of on site labor all the time? If you could do that, you could extend your hours to 24,7. So you're increasing capacity at the same time that you're reducing kind of your labor overhead. So you're working on kind of both sides of the math equation. And if you could do that, then you could do smaller format clubs. So that was the vision. Could you build a network of autonomous table tennis clubs spread out around New York? Wherever you are in New York, you should never be too far away from a Ping pod. Lots of people grew up playing the game. Nobody can afford to have a ping pong table in their apartment. But wouldn't it be great if it was across the street and it was available on demand and we put some cool technology in there to elevate the experience and we built some community around it. So that was, that was the vision. Got started in February of 2020. First location a great time to start a Consumer business promptly closed our doors along with everything else in March of 2020 in New York City. But after that initial gut punch, it was turned out a. Turned out to be something that was really great for the business because we were one of the first businesses in New York non essential businesses to reopen. We reopened in May of 2020 and you know, it became. The business really kind of grew like crazy during that, during that period. And we were able to do that because we were doing contactless entry, no employees on site, naturally socially distanced activity, and we could track everybody who came through the door.
- [06:57]
B
So Ben, when you say really took off in 2020 that first year, can you share in 2020 what was total revenue?
- [07:02]
A
Yeah, I mean just from a utilization. We had a single location, but it was. Utilization was like running between 60 and 70% on a 24 hour basis. So if you have a low fixed cost business, that unit was very, very, very, very profitable.
- [07:17]
B
Well, what does that mean though? I mean if you're, are you charging 60 bucks an hour, 70% utilization, so you're doing 100,000 bucks a year in revenue or what was it? I know you maybe feel small now, but I'm curious how it started.
- [07:25]
A
Yeah, no, no. Pricing is anywhere from 20 to $50 per hour. You have kind of private pods which are sort of a private space where you case your own space that has kind of one hourly rate. Then you can get a table in a open pod which is a shared space where there are kind of other people in that space. But I think the best way we look at kind of what is the average revenue per hour used, which is probably kind of the way you're thinking about this. And that in those days was about $30 per hour across everything. So there are different ways that you're taking revenue. And it's not just a pay to play model. You've got memberships, you have other sorts of things. But we always looked at it from a kind of the, the price volume relationship is how many hours do you have available, how many of those hours get used and how much do you get paid per hour during that?
- [08:17]
B
30 in 2020, then with that one location, 30, 30 per hour, 18 hour days would be about 70% utilization is about 540 per day. And if we take that 360 days a year, so five days off, that would be like 100, 150 to $200,000 of revenue from that one location that year. Is that about right? Something like that?
- [08:33]
A
It was in the hundreds of thousands.
- [08:34]
B
Guys. Remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm Invest Fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, @founderpath.com if you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up@founderpath.com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply. And I see all those, just reply and say, nathan, I found you through YouTube and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com okay, so it was fairly good. So you guys are on to something. And, and you're saying the big win here is because rents in New York are so exp. You had to figure out a way to not have like labor, for example. So this ping pong I'm looking at here in the Lower east side, is there any full time employee running this location or. It's all contactless entry.
- [09:18]
A
No full time employee? No.
- [09:19]
B
Interesting. Okay, well let's, let's talk about growth. Before the show you said, Nathan, one of the ways we've really grown, if we, we've really leaned into building in public, what does that mean?
- [09:28]
A
So I mean let's talk about the transition from kind of ping pod to, to pod play. Right. So ping pod was the predecessor business. That business now has 20 plus locations. So it's been successful. It's franchising. Our AM was always to build a technology platform that would not just serve ping pod, that would serve other like minded kind of venue operators. And we saw a gap in the market for sort of modern club management solutions. You wanted modern mobile first, really good user experience and then combining kind of hardware and software. So enhancing the kind of in club playing experience. We do things like digital scoreboards and video replays. There's a viral component to kind of the video replays that go social.
- [10:12]
B
Oh, this is cool, Ben. This is like super cool. You feel like a superstar playing in one of these things.
- [10:16]
A
Yeah, I mean the idea is to have your own kind of like personal sports center moment and make that as easy as possible. So part of the secret here is like, can you get rid of the friction? And in order to get rid of that friction, you need to do the club management, sort of reservation management and the video capture. So hardware and software. So most of the rest of the market you have kind of club management tools and then you have, you know, video capture tools that are, that are point solutions and that just creates More friction for getting to those, those videos. Whether you're scanning a QR code, you have to have separate login things like that. So really kind of the magic in this is, is combining hardware software in a single kind of full stack solution. So we got to that point in the summer of 2023. So you can think of this a little bit like the Amazon model where you build really good infrastructure for yourself and then you license it to others.
- [11:04]
B
So. So Ben, sorry, just to be clear, when did you write your first line of code for Pod Play that we're looking at on the screen and then what year was your first paying customer for Pod Play?
- [11:12]
A
Yes, the first line of code was this technology was originally written for Ping Pod. Right. So the software, the hardware, the whole package that we were putting together was the technology that powered Ping Pod. Right. So first line of code is in 2019. First outside customers we took in in the summer of 2023. That was when we formed Pod Play as a wholly owned subsidiary. You know, we put the whole tech team in there. Myself on the, on the business side, the tech team is led by a guy named Eliot Rifkin who's one of, one of our co founders. He's an amazing guy, comes from kind of a background in the fit tech world. He spent the bulk of his career at a digital agency called rga. His big projects there were the Equinox mobile booking app and the Nike running app. So he's built really large scale, kind of global consumer facing apps. And about 90% of our tech team has ties to those two projects. So our strategy has been to kind of go pick off all the best engineers, product managers and designers that Ilya worked with in the past and kind of reassembled them as a dream team. So yeah, 2023 we launch LaunchPod play as a wholly owned subsidiary to license the whole tech stack that we built to power Ping Pod to other like minded operators. And the real catalyst for that was, was Pickleball. Pickleball was growing like crazy in, in, in the U.S. you know, fastest growing kind of sport by a pretty. And people had seen what we'd done in table tennis. They loved the kind of, the experience, the ux, the software, how we were combining software and hardware and they basically said could you please do this in pickleball? So we obliged. We had some great launch partners in that space, including City Pickle. They run the iconic Pickleball at Central park in New York City.
- [12:59]
B
So Ben Soray, what does a launch partner mean? What does that mean? Like Are they one of your first customers and are you charging them by number? Of course. Or number of people or how do.
- [13:07]
A
You bill a Lighthouse client? We are charging on kind of a per quart basis. That's the kind of primary model. We have different tiers of the offering. They have kind of a software only offering. You have software plus hardware and then a subset of our clients are doing autonomous mode which also includes, you know, is doing the full ping pod model which includes door access, includes security cameras, includes monitoring by a team in the Philippines. So that's a kind of a different tier of the offering. But all of these are priced on a kind of per quarquirt basis. Roughly you end up with a SaaS fee. So it's not a transaction based model. We're getting monthly SaaS fees. I know you're always interested in numbers just to kind of put some numbers around the business. We are kind of approaching 3 million in contracted ARR. We have a little over 200 locations signed up on the platform. So these are sitting around between 10 and 15 per client. Again, there's a range. The software only clients are kind of generally in the sort of call it 2 to 6 range range. And then some of the kind of hardware enabled clients, which is I'd say 60% plus are in the hardware enabled tiers for us. Are those ACBs tend to be a bit higher.
- [14:19]
B
So just to repeat all that back to you. So when you say 200 locations on your platform, how many quarts does that equate to? Is that average of five quarts per location? So 1,000 quarts?
- [14:28]
A
No, I mean average is trending up closer to 10 per location. And so I think we're over 2,000 courts now.
- [14:35]
B
Interesting. Okay, this is really interesting growth. So you're at about 3 million bucks of ARR this year, which means you're finishing here in December at somewhere between somewhere around $240,000 a month of revenue. Right. Is that what you mean when you say contracted ARR?
- [14:47]
A
Now if you're a software client, on average it takes kind of one to two months from kind of signing to going live. For the hardware enabled clubs we have a longer lead time both because kind of a more involved process and because we have a backlog on that side. So I'd say the average on that side is somewhere between four and six months. So there's little bit of a lag between those two.
- [15:08]
B
Okay, that's right. And 3 million have contracted AR today. What does that represent in terms of growth rate from a year Prior triple digits.
- [15:15]
A
So yeah, put it, peg it between 100 and 200. Yes. More than 100%. Less than 200%.
- [15:21]
B
That's awesome. Okay, I have to go back to how you funded the business because I think you guys did a 10 million Series A in 2022, which would have been right before you launched the software. So are both of these companies under the same thing and you, you sort of raised money with the legacy business, but are sort of using it to invest in the software business?
- [15:36]
A
We raised money that $10 million Series A was for Ping Pod. That was sort of before Pod Play existed. And yes, some of the money from that was kind of the initial seating of the Pod Play business. We spun out Pod Play as a standalone entity in August of this year, which was a prelude to raising a Series A for standalone Pod Play, which we did in October. So $8 million Series A round led by Frontier Growth, which is kind of an OG investor in the vertical SaaS space. We're super excited to kind of, you know, lock arms with them. They've been Investing in vertical SaaS since 1999. Before, you know, say before vertical SaaS was a thing. They've invested in, you know, some big names that you would, you would know from the vertical SaaS space. They, you know, focus entirely on vertical SaaS. So it's industry specific software and have just deep experience and network in the space. Which was exactly what we were looking for to sort of lock arms for somebody who be kind of down in the trenches with us.
- [16:38]
B
And most folks been in 2025 doing a series A. We're selling between, call it maybe like 13 and 18% of their business. Were you sort of in that same range with the 8 million Series A?
- [16:47]
A
Yeah, we're not wildly away from that. Okay, say exactly what the valuation is, but it's not a, it's not an unusual valuation in terms of kind of like dilution.
- [16:55]
B
Yeah, fair enough. How do you as a ex hedge fund guy, I mean whenever I think about this, I always think about bits and atoms. Right. You're building bits and at your business is both of these things, but you have the unique intel to see which court are making the most revenue per hour or per day or whatever per court time. If you had a bunch of money, unlimited money, I mean, wouldn't you go roll up the best performing physical courts around the world?
- [17:18]
A
So I mean, it's an interesting question. It's like what business do you want to be in? Right? So if you're in kind of the physical business. There is, I think there is more kind of variability that's associated with that. And so we are excited to be kind of supporting physical businesses. I think it's, I wrote a blog called, you know, building Digital Tools for Physical Spaces. You know, we do think that there are particularities and kind of domain expertise that's required in order to kind of build, build a tech stack for physical spaces. That's different than, you know, building a purely digital product. A purely digital product, you know, is attractive to a lot of people because it can sort of, you know, scale to infinity and you sort of, you know, are free of kind of the constraints of time and space. It's also way more competitive. So if you're going to try building another social network, it's very difficult at this point because it is one of the most attractive models out there. Whereas if you're building for things that have these physical characteristics, it's not as flexible. But if you can build a really valuable product for that market, it's incredibly sticky and it's incredibly valuable to the people who are running those businesses. I'm just asking you like, why would you do the roll up or would you do, would you do kind of a software business?
- [18:39]
B
I think you're going to see a lot of software companies today realize that they can't compete with AI unless they sit on some kind of memory about their customers that the general AI foundational models don't have access to. Right. You have access to court and revenue and sales data that ChatGPT, Gemini, the other labs don't have access to. The question becomes if your software is an emote anymore because anyone can build software and actually the memory you have on your customers is the asset. What do you do to help drive that asset? Obviously selling them softw is good, but what about lending them money based off predicting their 2026 court revenue? If you, maybe, if you lend them money, maybe they want to sell one day because the family wants to get out of the court business, then you could buy it. Then you're doing like sort of atoms and bits. So I don't know where it's going to go. I just think the future is a lot of vertical SaaS, companies sitting on unique data. We're going to see very interesting allocation of capital.
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A
Now do you, do you think people are, can, can vibe code a really good vertical solution?
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B
No, I think, I think no. I think the answer is no. Yeah.
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A
So we would agree with you that it's, it's, it's, you can put together a Prototype, like, and you can vibe code your way to kind of a, you know, a simple scheduling app, but you can't vibe code your way to. To something that has kind of deep value to a domain, 100% distribution, et cetera.
- [19:49]
B
So, hey, quick things, I want to wrap up with you rapid fire, if we can. Just three questions here. Number one, you're building ghost gyms. I mean, they're sports facilities with zero staff, right? Is this the future of fitness in your opinion, or are we just sort of willing to kill the social aspect of sports in terms of the admin for the sake of higher margins?
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A
Yeah, I would say you're not getting rid of kind of the social aspect of it. You are. And I would not call it kind of a ghost gym. Right. So when we started out, people said, hey, are you going to lose the human touch? Well, the human touch isn't necessarily a positive if the piece that you're, you know, if you have kind of front desk and we serve plenty of staff facilities and it's difficult to kind of like get really good front desk people because the best people kind of move on to something else. So the goal was like, can you kind of free yourself of that constraint and replace that with kind of like walking into the. When you walk into kind of a pod play facility, you should be walking into the future, right? It shouldn't feel like less, it should feel like more. And in addition to that, you're giving people flexibility, you're giving them proximity, all of the things that kind of they want in this day and age. So I. And those resources can be redirected towards community building, right? So it's not like there's nobody on site, but it's just, you know, instead of a front desk, it might be a coach, it might be somebody who's kind of like organizing events. And so you redirect that energy and resource towards, you know, more valuable activities.
- [21:09]
B
All right, two more here. Pickle ball is the fastest growing sport in the world. Many people would say this, but a lot of clubs are losing a bunch of money on real estate. How do your customers actually make the math work without charging 100 bucks an hour?
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A
You do have to get the real estate. You have to get the real estate, right? We're playing a part in that, right?
- [21:25]
B
So we.
- [21:26]
A
Some of the clubs that we're supporting are doing less from kind of a staffing standpoint because they're working with pod play. I think the other aspect is working on kind of the revenue side. So some of the features that we offer like kind of the videos and replays functionality. Those can be monetized. They can be monetized with sponsors. So we always look at, we want to say we want to compete on roi, not price. And kind of that roi, the components of that is like, can we, we enable new lines of revenue for a club? Can we kind of reduce costs through kind of reducing kind of like labor overhead and introducing efficiencies? And then can we improve the user experience? We do think that kind of the best clubs are going to win based on user experience. I think in the early days of pickleball was enough to just have your doors open was a competitive advantage because the demand was so far exceeding the supply. But as those balance, we do think that the best clubs are going to win on kind of user experience and community over time. And if, you know, the more we can kind of enable that, the more we're going to enable those clubs to be profitable.
- [22:26]
B
All right, last one here. If I wanted to open an autonomous pickleball court tomorrow, what's the hidden cost that'll kill most founders before they even open their doors?
- [22:34]
A
I mean, this was kind of our big learning with, with Ping Pod. If we kind of found a white box that was. We didn't have to do any kind of like structural work from a H vac standpoint, from a plumbing standpoint. There are two aspects to this. One is how much capital goes into the business, right? So how much are you spending to kind of get that, get your doors open? And then the second aspect is time to revenue, right, because you, you know, if you have to do a lot of kind of structural work in order to get kind of a place open, it takes longer to get the revenue. So not only are you kind of committing more money, and, you know, there's also an emotional cost if you're dealing with kind of like permitting and contractors, these things tend to lag. But that's the biggest kind of, you know, gotcha in starting a physical business that most people miss is if you can control the amount of capital that goes in and you can kind of reduce the time to get your doors open, you're going to have a much better roi. So, you know, what I would say is you would prefer a slightly lesser location that if you can get kind of that white box that doesn't have a lot of structural work and you can put less money into it and get open faster than getting that kind of prime location if you have to do a bunch of work to it.
- [23:47]
B
Ben, on that note, if Folks want to follow your stories. You keep growing the community and the software and the hardware. Where's the best place they can find you online?
- [23:53]
A
I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so I'd, you know, find me on LinkedIn regularly post some of my musings on the Pod Play blog. So podplay app, backslash blog. And you know, if you want to go down the rabbit hole, there is definitely a rabbit hole there to go down. Also Pod Play, YouTube channel, Pod Play Instagram channel. We're very active across both of those guys.
- [24:13]
B
There you have it. Ben Borton launched physical ping pong communities back in 2020. Then Covid hit shut it down. Reopened in May in New York City. Did a couple hundred thousand bucks in revenue that first year by renting out courts by the hour hour, about 30 bucks per hour. 70, 70 utilization on those physical courts. They had open really good first year as it continued to scale. Now by 2023 they said, man, how do we get more into the software world? They wrote code that is now called Podplay and they spun it out officially in 2025 this year with an 8 million Series A. You know, sold, sold the typical amount you sell, Series A. Now they're scaling. They've got about 3 million bucks of contracted revenue on this platform serving 200 locations, about 10 quarts per location. Folks paying for their software to run these. These locations are paying between 2 and 6k per year. Hardware clients going up closer to 10k. But if you check out the site podplay.com you'll see how they're building community. They're helping create viral moments, additional revenue streams and really helping folks create community, which we need more of in this age of AI where everyone gets stuck behind their computer. Ben, thank you for taking us to the top stop.
- [25:13]
A
Sure, thanks for having me.
- [25:15]
B
You won't believe this CEO's revenue. Click here to watch the next episode. Right now.